What’s your Brain Wealth? Retiring from work without retiring from life

For many women, the dream of retirement is the prospect of spending more time with family and friends, travelling the world or focusing on personal passions and hobbies. For too many women, however, retirement can also be a time of loss.

Compared to men, retired women are more likely to experience the death of a partner, bouts of poverty, diminished cognitive functioning and an overall decline in their sense of well-being.

The key to retiring from work — but not from life — may be maintaining our “Brain Wealth,” something I define as the combination of emotional, cognitive and financial health. It can help us stay present, connected, happy and secure in our lives, despite the challenges we may face.

Not your father’s retirement

Let’s be honest, retirement was never designed with the contours of today’s working woman in mind. When the traditional retirement age was set at 65, the workforce was mostly male and a typical career consisted of an unbroken working stretch that lasted about 40 years. The average life expectancy of men at that time was also 66 years.¹ In other words, the workforce consisted mostly of men who worked continuously for their whole adult lives, retired and died shortly thereafter.

Cut to today. Women make up almost half of the workforce. However, unlike their male peers, working women are likely to experience numerous career disruptions related to childbearing and childrearing, caregiving for elders and attendant periods of part-time work and unemployment.² Women are also more likely to experience challenges related to income inequality and sexism in securing and maintaining high-level paid work or pension security.

Demographics have shifted over the past three decades as well. There are more unmarried than married adults for the first time in history, single-person dwellings are now the most popular domestic arrangement, fewer women are having children and chronology no longer dictates life stage.³ For example, a 51-year-old woman may be a retirement-ready grandmother, or the mother of a young child, still in the prime of her career.

Enter the COVID-19 pandemic. Approximately 3.5 million North American women left the workforce to care for children during the long months of online schooling to care for vulnerable, aging parents and in-laws or all of the above.⁴ The timing of this pandemic workplace exodus meant that, for millions of women, retirement planning was upended and compromised. That’s because the average elder caregiver is a 49-year-old working woman with children still at home.

Some women may never retire, retire repeatedly or even begin new careers or interests. Moreover, retirement can mean many things — it’s basically a “one size fits one” world when it comes to our relationship with work.

With all the challenges and opportunities women face during their working years, it can be important to tailor retirement to your personal lived experiences, wants and needs. However, the common denominator in being able to help plan and live the retirement you want and deserve will be something deeper. It will likely depend on the level of your Brain Wealth.

What is Brain Wealth?

Brain Wealth is a combination of brain and financial health. Brain health refers to your sense of emotional well-being and cognitive functioning, including thinking, memory and decision-making. Financial health means having the knowledge, skills and behaviours necessary to help keep yourself financially stable. Put emotional well-being, cognitive functioning and financial stability together and you get Brain Wealth.

Why is Brain Wealth so important for women in retirement?

Emotional well-being is a part of brain health that is often compromised across the female lifespan. For example, women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression as men. This may be due to biological changes like pregnancy and menopause and to stressors that women are more likely to experience, such as poverty and domestic violence.⁵

And, when it comes to cognitive health, women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with dementia as men.⁶ Moreover, individuals with a history of untreated depression are twice as likely to develop dementia later in life, compared to people who do not.⁷

Finally, women also tend to live longer. That means an increasing risk of mental health issues and cognitive impairment, plus a need to stretch their financial resources over a longer time horizon than men.